The Draw

by Lee Siegel

  That late autumn afternoon, Matthew and I finished our work just as it was growing dark. We rang the bell. Mrs. Adler, wearing loose slacks and her husband’s slippers, came to the door. She dropped four bright shiny quarters into each of our hands with a kind, weak smile. I did not understand why she was wearing her husband’s slippers. I said goodbye to Matthew and ran home, clutching the coins in my hand. I had no idea what they meant, or why I had received four rather than one, two, or twenty. But I felt proud and excited.

  I carried them to my mother, who cooed with happiness and stroked my face. She took me upstairs to her bedroom. Opening a drawer, she lifted out a jewelry box that I had made for her in school by gluing dried macaroni to the top of a cigar box and spray-painting the whole thing gold.

  We both sat on the edge of the bed. I put the coins in her hand. She sat there with the change in her hand and said, “This is the first money you earned yourself, my darling boy. I am going to keep this money here, in the box you made for me. It will always be there for you. When you are older and all grown up, it will still be here, waiting for you.” Holding a coin up, she showed me the distinguished likeness on its front. Then she put the change in the box and placed the box back in the drawer. She kissed me on my cheek.

  A few years later, after the situation at home had changed, my mother told me that Shelly Adler was a fraud who had lied about a relationship with my father so that he could ingratiate himself with a developer whom he was trying to convince to collaborate with him on a luxury apartment complex. She also said that Matthew Cassidy’s father was an alcoholic who worked as an office boy for an architectural firm. The Adlers’ small, run-down split-level house with its tiny yard has been bought and sold many times since then, but it is still there. The jewelry box disappeared decades ago. I don’t know if any of the quarters remain in circulation, or if they were all withdrawn, melted down, and turned into brand-new coins.

  * * *

  I can’t recall where or when I read an essay about adventure that has stuck in my mind ever since. Adventure was, in this account, a break in the cause and effect that rules our lives. It was an independent, self-sufficient piece of experience that had its own dynamic, its own laws, its own beginning, middle, and end. The experience of adventure resembled a work of art. I liked this line in the essay especially: the adventurer “is not determined by any past, nor, on the other hand, does the future exist for him.”

  I grew up as a mall adventurer. My friends and I played games of tag in Paramus’s malls from the time we were old enough to take the bus to the Garden State Plaza and the Bergen Mall. One person closed his eyes and counted. Everyone else would disperse among the racks, bins, mirrors, and fitting rooms, nearly knocking customers down, and fleeing from the store security.

  I didn’t consider the stores places of crass commercialism. I saw them as instances of transubstantiation, like Matthew Cassidy’s mysterious sacraments: realms of retail freedom.

  On display, for sale, belonging to some abstract company only as long as no one purchased them, the objects in these stores were pure, deracinated forms: sovereign and autonomous—mirror images of my ideal self. They were material things that had been liberated from matter and transported into my imagination. Playing among them, I could release myself from the facts of my life that weighed me down.

  In the furniture department, I was a husband and father, returning home to the solid possessions of sofa, armchair, bureau, wardrobe, all of them so heavy and established on the floor that no upheaval could move them. I was in a state of joy when I hid behind a dresser so big that none of my friends could see me. In men’s furnishings, as I concealed myself behind racks of clothes, I could imagine myself as a secret agent or an architect in a dark blue suit.

  Women’s clothing had its allure, too. My friends and I might have sworn allegiance time and again, in one bewildered male-bonding rite after another, to the romantic pursuit of girls, but it delighted me to disappear into a fitting room and slip into a summer dress or a miniskirt. Fur coats sent me over the moon. Once I tried one on, fascinated by the first split second in which I failed to recognize myself.

  * * *

  As I became more alienated at home and in school, the alienating environment of the department stores grew more comforting. In Alexander’s, where I started as a stock boy, I worked alongside mostly black kids and young black men from Paterson, Newark, and nearby Ridgewood, the last an affluent white town with a sizable population of poor black people. We carried boxes of clothes out to the floor, where we refilled the vast bins with them. There was the usual basic solidarity in work, but because they were black, and I was white, relations between us were self-conscious even as we pretended that the differences did not exist. We were considerate to each other where we might have been casually helpful. This created an actual, if temporary, bond where there would otherwise have been merely a working relationship. But the bond was deliberate. Sometimes it fell into place, and sometimes it was strenuous—and sometimes the other person or I wanted no part of any bond at all. Wherever a bond existed, though, whether it was comfortable or labored at, we had to construct it from scratch each time we found ourselves working together.

  Boy, you are quite the worker bee, a slender black guy with delicate hands that reminded me of my father’s said to me one evening. His friends laughed as I pushed myself to stack one fresh box of clothes after another on the shelves in the stockroom. He winked to his friends and put his arm around my shoulders. Take a break, he said.

  I sat down on a box, wiping my forehead with my sleeve. He and his friends finished unloading my cart. They stacked everything neatly on the shelves, side by side. Time’s a feather when you work together, he intoned, deepening his voice and glancing over at the others. A few bent their heads, chuckling. He clapped me gently on my back.

  Many of the saleswomen were also black. To my surprise, some of them returned my interest in them. Whereas the white girls my age flirted in indirect code-language and through evasive gestures, the black girls addressed me sincerely and with a kind of motherly warmth. No matter how sensual they appeared to me, and how much they flirted, they all seemed to me to have this maternal warmth way at the back of their sensuality. It was especially strong, to the point where the flirtatiousness disappeared, in the presence of the black guys who worked with me in the stockroom.

  There was an anthropological quality to the women’s interest in me, too. They knew all about turbulence and anguish, but I don’t think very many of them had encountered that state in an approachable, sympathetic-seeming white boy, and at such close quarters. From time to time, I had to go somewhere and sit staring into space. They considered me with curiosity and sympathy.

  For my part, I regarded them with guarded expectation. We shared a lot of jokes. The humor dissolved the preexisting unease between us and created a new, pleasurable tension. Together we moved around inside the same half-playful, half-experimental bubble. At the end of every shift we said goodbye with smiles of complicity, as if to congratulate each other on completing that day’s or night’s two activities: straightforward work and a kind of confused, excited pretense—electric with promise but signifying and leading to nothing.

  * * *

  Walking into one of the great department stores was like entering another universe. Bamberger’s, Gimbels, Stern’s, Alexander’s: in my eyes, they embodied mysteries, like the pyramids. I worked three evenings a week after school, and also on Saturdays. I made roughly eighty dollars per week, and every Friday night I gave my mother something like thirty or forty dollars.

  Of course there were the long stretches of time deadened by rote work, stretches during which you would glance at your watch, see that it was five after seven, help some customers, straighten some racks, take instructions from one of your bosses, and look at your watch again after all that time-consuming activity, only to see that it was seven-ten.

  But I could dress up! I could transform myself in preparation for th
at shift’s transformations. The telltale formality of the permanent-press shirts I wore on dates, which made me feel awkward even as I submitted to the habit of wearing them, didn’t matter in the store. Everyone who worked there, including the stock boys, dressed formally, as if for church. I wore a crisp oxford shirt and a pair of dress pants with an ineradicable crease.

  Roaming in your best clothes through the department you had been assigned to, you felt how the parameters of existence had changed. The people who approached you, or to whom you offered assistance, played a strange new role: they were customers. You were the salesman. And they needed you. Given my prim aversion to any type of human interaction defined by financial terms, I should have deplored the empty transactionality of it all. Instead I prized the elemental purity in the relationship between salesman and customer.

  All life revolves around what people want. There would be no history and no culture if people did not want things, and if different people did not want different things. Underneath the layer upon layer of social convention and psychological defense, there is always the naked fact of wanting. “Can I help you?” “Yes, I am looking for a vest.” “What type of vest?” “A white vest that I can wear under a dark sport coat.” “What size are you?” “I wear a forty-six.” “Why don’t you try this? Here you go.” “Thank you.” “You’re very welcome. How does it fit?” “It’s a little snug.” “Yes, I see. Why don’t you try this?” “Thank you.” “You’re very welcome. How does that fit?” “I like it.” “Yes?” “Yes, I do. Do you have it in yellow?” “Yellow?” “Yes, I think I’d prefer it in yellow.” “No, I’m sorry. It comes in black and beige.” “You like it in beige?” “Absolutely.” “I don’t look fat?” “Not at all.” “It’s not too loose down here?” “No. But if it feels loose, you can always do that. Or that. There you go.” “It doesn’t bulge up here?” “No.” “Okay, then. I’ll take it.” “Wonderful.” “Where do I pay?” “Right up there. Turn left at the end of that aisle.” “That way?” “No, this way.” “This way?” “No, that way. Yes. And then turn left.” “Thank you.” “No, to the left.” “Thank you.” “You’re very welcome.”

  Outside the store, Charles Manson was serving time for recently slicing up the pregnant Sharon Tate and her friends. Vietnam was being seared with napalm. The genocidal Khmer Rouge was coming to power. Nixon’s henchmen had broken into the Watergate Hotel. My mother was waiting at home for me in her new tight jeans, and my father was staring out the window in his rented room. In the world outside, the square pegs and round holes of perversely or savagely misaligned desires led to pain and misery. The department stores, however, had rationalized desire down to a science. In them, you were not afraid to be troubled, damaged, defeated, or dead.

  I did some research and discovered a department store in downtown Peoria called Bergner’s. I planned to apply for a job there once I settled in at Bradley.

  * * *

  Not long after I received the acceptance letter from Bradley, and after my brother had gone to sleep, my mother and I sat at the kitchen table, going over the budget for college. My mother’s voice broke as we talked about my living nearly a thousand miles away from her. Yet as the fact of the freedom that awaited me stared us both in the face, her eyes contracted with that envy that still confounded me. A small part of her wanted to keep me with her, to saddle me with her own constraints. But I was also standing in the way of her own path to freedom. Her impatience to start her new life became entwined with her impatience to get me out of the house.

  As I’ve said, neither she nor my father had the money to pay for Bradley. The idea was that student loans, combined with need-based financial aid from Bradley and the government financial aid program known as Pell Grants, would cover the tuition and part of the room and board. If I had to take out more loans for a private university, then so be it. All of my friends were taking out loans to go to college. If your family was rich, you graduated from college without debt, no matter what your particular gifts were. If your family had below-average means or was poor, you almost always needed a loan to attend college—for the most part, no matter what your particular gifts were.

  Exceptions to the iron rule of student loans for the unwealthy were sometimes made for gifted kids so poor that the college or university paid their way. These were rare cases, especially in 1975. But though my family had no money, we were not poor. My mother still had the house. My parents still both had marketable skills and modest incomes. Their social world, such as it was, still consisted of people at the lower end of the middle class. And I did not possess, on paper anyway, exceptional gifts.

  My mother wrote out my expenses with a pencil on a sheet of notepaper in her neat, teacher’s hand. Along with the income from the part-time job I would need to get, she said that she would give me enough money, out of the child support my father was sending her, to pay the still substantial portion of room and board that the student loan wouldn’t cover. All that remained was for me to apply for the loan.

  One late summer afternoon when I was seventeen, I went with my mother to the local bank to complete the paperwork for the borrowed money. My hand shook with excitement as I signed the papers. The impersonal, institutional occasion had an atmosphere of quiet, festive ceremony to it, as my mother looked with gratitude at the banker, and the banker beamed at her and me with an air of being an agent of mobility and positive change. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late fifties, shook both our hands.

  The celebration continued later that evening when my mother, Nathan, and I met my father at the Suburban Diner, a restaurant on Route 17 that he liked to frequent. My father in particular was jubilant that the bank had approved the loan. Until that moment at the bank the prospect of my going to college was abstract, still open to change. Signing the loan papers made my imminent departure concrete, essentially irreversible.

  3

  WHAT NOW, VOYAGER?

  The Greyhound bus to Chicago left New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal one evening in late August. By the time it was dark, we were in western Pennsylvania. That was as far west as I had ever been.

  If I pressed my head against the window and strained my neck, I could catch sight of dense clusters of stars, more than I had ever seen at one time. Though the night was mild, the air-conditioning on the bus was on full blast. It made the stars seem so distant and cold that I shivered to look at them.

  Under the stars the landscape rushing past us was pitch black. I could not understand how such bright things did not shed their light below. I knew next to nothing about how the physical world operated. I detested science’s privileging of the facts. In the world of science, the facts of my life would have disqualified me from respect or admiration. I barely passed my high school science courses and retained almost a child’s naïveté about the physical world. I conceived of the physical world the way I wanted it to be. I thought the stars were made of pure light.

  Directly outside the windows of the bus were dark masses of trees. Occasionally a watery glow of golden light from a house or houses was visible behind them. The lights made me yearn for home. Not the home I was leaving, but a home situated in the future, still undiscovered. I felt homesick for this undiscovered home that lay further on in time.

  Among my cherished sickbed books had been a prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey. My favorite passage was the one where Odysseus is shipwrecked and washes up onshore. Exhausted, he finds refuge in a grove, between two olive trees, where the goddess Athena “closed his eyelids, and made him lose all memories of his sorrows.” Along with wanting to escape from home and broaden my horizons beyond New Jersey, I yearned to find a place to rest and to pull myself together. I sat with my head leaning against the window, watching for the lights as the bus proceeded to Chicago. From there I was to take another bus to Peoria, just under two hundred miles to the south.

  * * *

  Bradley was not far from downtown Peoria, and it was unlike any place I had ever th
ought I would be. Part of its uniqueness lay in its origins. Bradley had been founded in wealth and sorrow. Lydia Moss Bradley and her husband, Tobias Bradley, made a fortune in banking and real estate in Peoria in the mid-nineteenth century. They were married for thirty years, their union happy and productive. But neither their wealth nor their industriousness protected them from tragedy. By the time Tobias died in 1867, all six of their children had died.

  Bereft and alone at the age of fifty, Lydia did not withdraw from the world. She threw herself into humanitarian endeavors that would be supported by the riches she and Tobias had accumulated together.

  Lydia and Tobias had explored the possibility of building an orphanage as a tribute to their children. After Tobias’s death, Lydia undertook the project by herself. She traveled around the country to visit orphanages. She consulted with people on how best to realize her and Tobias’s dreams. Gradually, she expanded her ambitions away from their original plan. She began to envision a place not just of shelter and protection but of empowerment and advancement. According to Bradley’s official history, she wanted “to found a school where young people could learn how to do practical things to prepare them for living in the modern world.”

  The more I read about Bradley, the more I felt drawn toward its aura of Christian stoicism and reserve. The embarrassing and dishonorable truth was that I associated my parents’ emotional weakness and lack of emotional restraint with their Jewishness.